Author: jkost

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Probing XR’s Futures: Opening Workshop 

“Extended reality” (XR) devices like Apple’s recently announced Vision Pro or Meta’s Oculus Quest 3 enable new possibilities for mixing the real world with a computationally generated one, promising to “change interaction as we know it.” What are we to make of this claim?  

To tackle this question, Probing XR’s Futures brings together designers, scholars, artists and curators during a 4-year SNF-funded research project. Its opening workshop on Wednesday, 19 June 2024, will bring together project partners, collaborators, and interested researchers at the Immersive Arts Space to take a first stab at core issues relating to XR from contrasting perspectives. These perspectives include design fiction, sensory ethnography, video analysis, critical disability studies, STS and more. 

The opening workshop at the IAS offers an apt opportunity to engage interdisciplinary conversation on design fiction, bodily experience, and critical inquiry, while providing a forum for instructive exchange between upcoming scholars and established researchers. Confirmed participants include Sabine Himmelsbach (HeK Basel), David Howes (Concordia), Lorenza Mondada (Basel), Pilar Orero (Barcelona), Andreas Uebelbacher (Zugang für Alle, Zurich).    

Workshop participation is upon invitation. For those interested in joining, please contact Joëlle Kost at IAS. 

Where: ZHdK | Immersive Arts Space | 1.J30
When: 19.06.2024

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Immersive Arts Research

The IASpace team conducts practice-based research on the field of interaction between art, design and digital technology. The team members have their professional roots in film, game design, interaction design, music, computer science and engineering, and often members have a background in more than one discipline. The IASpace is part of the research cluster of the Digitalization Initiative of the Zurich Higher Education Institutions (DIZH).

Current Research Projects

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SNSF-Project: Probing XR’s Futures. Design Fiction, Bodily Experience, Critical Inquiry

“Extended reality (XR) devices like Apple’s recently announced Vision Pro or Meta’s Oculus Quest 3 enable new possibilities for mixing the real world with a computationally generated one, promising to “change interaction as we know it.”  Yet, there is little research on exactly how XR might reshape bodily subjectivity and experience. Probing XR’s Futures utilizes a critically-historically informed, practice-based design approach to examines how XR technologies reimagine bodily subjectivity, interaction and experience, on the one hand, and how bodily experience could reimagine XR, on the other. The 4-year project employs critical, creative, conceptual and empirical approaches to address three questions: How is everyday interaction in XR achieved? How will XR change interaction and what social reciprocity and mutual access will be enabled? What concrete effects and forms of discipline will be enacted on disabled bodies interacting in XR? The objective is to use design fiction, a design research method that prototypes objects and scenarios to provoke new ways of thinking about the future, as a form of critical inquiry to probe the present and future of social interaction in XR in three different settings and contexts: the lab, public space and in collaboration with disabled researchers and communities. Situated at the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts, the project is at the interdisciplinary intersection of Critical VR studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and experimental media design. It will constitute one of the first in the context of Swiss and German speaking design research to develop alternative thinking and experimental aesthetic-design analysis, reflection and critique of XR directly in situated action and use with the general public.

Team:
Christopher Salter (Project Lead)
Puneet Jain (PhD Candidate)
Eric Larrieux (Researcher)
Chris Elvis Leisi (Researcher)
Oliver Sahli (Researcher)
Philippe Sormani (Senior Researcher)
Stella Speziali (Researcher)

Project Partners:
Andreas Uebelbacher (Access for All Foundation)
John David Howes (Concordia University Montreal, Sociology/Anthropology)
Sabine Himmelsbach (Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel, HeK)
Pilar Orero (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Transmedia Research Group)
Lorenza Mondada (Universität Basel, Institut für Französische Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft)

Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF (01.11.2023 – 31.10.2027)

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Zurich Art Weekend @ Immersive Arts Space

At the Zurich Art Weekend, the Immersive Arts Space will provide insights into two ongoing research projects that deal with the transfer of the visitor’s body into the digital domain in different ways. The multiuser mixed reality experience Doppelgänger invites visitors to a confrontation with their own self as a three-dimensional double in a real environment. In the installation A Hero’s Return, the viewers’ bodies provide the starting point for generative heroic images in real time.

When: 07.06.24 | 17:00 – 21:00
08.06.24 | 13:00 – 17:00
09.06.24 | 13:00 – 16:00
Where: ZHdK | Immersive Arts Space | 1.J30

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A Hero’s Return

The interactive installation A Hero’s Return transforms visitors’ poses into a digitally generated alter ego. The creation of the character and its background is realized in real-time by artificial intelligence models. This installation prototype explores the capabilities of these models (such as Stable Diffusion) and focuses on the technical and aesthetic possibilities in combination with the performative interaction with visitors. The installation also incorporates popular film representation techniques: a virtual camera performs a circular tracking shot around the scanned visitor’s body, reminiscent of scenes from numerous action hero films.

Credits:
Artists: Martin Fröhlich, Stella Speziali
Thanks to: Ege Seçgin
Produced by: Immersive Arts Space – Zurich University of the Arts

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Doppelgänger

Doppelgänger is a multiuser mixed reality experience that let’s the participants confront their own, computer generated 3D double in the real surrounding. While co-present with other participants, they are also co-present with their own double while keeping it very personal and intimate to engage participants in interacting with their ‘mirror image’. While the participants get the feeling to be in control over their ‘mirror image’, this changes rapidly after a short time and the double, now free from the strings of its original, starts to invade the participants personal space, leading to a disturbing and perhaps even a bit uncanny play between the two of them.

Before the experience begins, a frontal 2D image of the participants is taken and quickly transformed into an animated 3D reconstruction with Nevo (Neural Volumetric Capture), a software developed at the IAS. After this ‘set up’ process, the participants put on the XR head mounted display and the experience starts. When they put on the headset, they see the real environment captured by a camera on the headset, but in this familiar space they see their double in front of them. The experience has a fixed duration and is interactive, combined with a dramaturgy that is divided into three main parts.

Credits:  
Artists: Chris Elvis Leisi, Christopher Salter
Machine Learning (NEVO): Florian Bruggisser
Sound: Pascal Lund-Jensen
Produced by: Immersive Arts Space – Zurich University of the Arts

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BODIES-MACHINES-PUBLICS

A glocal network exploring bodies in the age of computer mediated reality

BODIES-MACHINES-PUBLICS brings together a “glocal” (global and local) network of cultural and research partners in Switzerland, India and Chile that seek to provide time and space for artists to develop prototypes and works exploring the sensitive body and technical mediation in relation to public space. The project is a two-year collaborative initiative between NAVE (Chile), KHOJ Studios (India), Immersive Arts Space/ZHdK (Zurich, Switzerland) and Kornhausforum (Bern, Switzerland) and is supported by the Pro Helvetia Synergies Program.

People increasingly interact with technologies such as wearable sensors, VR/AR headsets or other data gathering systems on an intimate, bodily level which successfully blurs the lines between the physical and the digital; the body and its interaction with its environment. At the same time, the involuntary data collection and machine-led decisions that arise from these sensing technologies exacerbates historical inequalities, particularly affecting marginalized groups. Addressing the capture of human motion, thoughts and experience through new technologies is therefore an ongoing challenge that requires new kinds of creative and imaginative practices.

We are interested in the contribution of artists who are processually exploring the relationship between existing power structures using both digital and physical technologies and the possibility of challenging them through artistic-led creation, where the human body lies at the center of the exploration. Proposals for installations, and/or performative interventions indoors and outdoors are particularly welcome.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

For 2024, the BODIES-MACHINES-PUBLICS project invites Swiss artists together with Chilean visual, performing and media artists, designers, architects or researchers working between art, technology and science for a joint research residency at the Immersive Arts Space and Kornhausforum Bern in Switzerland. Artists for the residencies can apply through an open call from May 8, 2024 to July 07, 2024. The residency will last four weeks, two weeks in each institution (Immersive Arts Space and Kornhausforum) between September 5 and October 5, 2024. The aim of the residency is to develop prototypes and works that can be publicly exhibited. In each venue, technical and production support will be provided as well as travel, accommodation, artist and production fees. The selected artists will also be involved in internal and public workshops at the venues and will present their research work in progress to local artistic and research communities. Full details of the open call can be found here.

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Residencies at Immersive Arts Space

The Immersive Arts Space, in collaboration with other institutions and departments of the ZHdK, offers residency opportunities to artists and researchers. Current calls for proposals, as well as current and past collaborations, can be found here.

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G.–Ai performance by Victoria Cheredeeva

The digital world is a place where reality collapses, and it seems that everything is possible. Become an idol and perform in front of an audience, where the avatar you created transforms the space into a brilliant show—an attempt to create a digital realm where everyone can be an idol, no matter the limits. “G.–Ai performance” uses constructed narratives in the idol industry and tries to reinvent and deform them.  

When: June 5, 2024 | 18:00 and 18:30
Where: ZHdK | Immersive Arts Space | 1J.30


Credits: 
Claudio Linares Burbat (composer and producer) 
Antonia Orfanou (cartographer and performer) 
Lea Bishoff (singer) 
Alberto Mancini (audio engineer) 
Stella Speziali (Immersive Arts Space support) 
 
The performance is part of Victoria’s diploma project for her Master in Interaction Design at ZHdK.